Questions for the questioner

Thuy (pronounced Twee) Vo Dang, 34, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine, where she is director of a Vietnamese American Oral History Project. Last fall, she began training college students to conduct the oral history interviews. Many of them started with their own parents.

You are the director of a project that seeks to record the history of the Vietnamese American experience in Southern California, and you've conducted a high percentage of them yourself, yet you haven't interviewed your own family. How come?

I am from a Vietnamese American family of 11 that left Vietnam as boat refugees in the early 1980s. I grew up unintentionally overhearing fragments of my parents' experiences in Vietnam, my dad's experience in the South Vietnamese military and the collective tales of our family's year spent in refugee camps – usually over liquor-animated conversations between my dad and his friends. I vaguely know that my dad was wounded during the war and he has the telltale scar on his leg. My family was never very communicative about the past, a condition I believe is very common among refugee and immigrant families. There is a culture of silence within such families … So much of the life we've built here in the U.S. is contingent on forgetting some of this traumatic past. So, to get to the point, I will work my way toward interviewing family members. I think this project has given me the courage to do so soon.

How difficult is it to get people to really open up? Are some of them reticent to tell their stories?

It really depends on the individual being interviewed. We call them narrators. Some factors that influence how open a narrator is might be level of education, sense of modesty, or even fear of reprisal from the Vietnam government. I've had a number of people tell me that if they “spoke the truth,” they may be watched closely by the Vietnam government for sharing the stories about what they endured or witnessed. Some have shared very intimate, private experiences that they have never shared with anyone else before, and this can be very emotional and difficult for both the narrator and interviewer. But this is where oral history may have the power to heal.

Do you hear common threads in the stories?

The Vietnamese American community is very diverse, even if it may appear homogeneous to outsiders. Vietnamese Americans may come from the North, Central or South with distinctive accents that set them apart automatically during the interview. They may have left Vietnam prior to 1975 as students or war brides, evacuated during the “Fall of Saigon,” escaped during the decade after, or sponsored by family. This makes a difference in the way they relate to the homeland and to each other in the community. They may be from affluent families who lived bourgeois lives in Saigon before 1975 or workers from the countryside with little education. … All these stories about life in Vietnam after 1975 were about struggle and loss. There are other threads in terms of the similar struggles of adaption to life in the U.S. in the early years, not unlike other immigrant groups.

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